I’ve never had as peaceful a work life as back when I used yahoo pipes to organize all the RSS feeds from GitHub and Jira and others into a unified view of what’s happening in all my projects.

It broke due to a fluke because a network engineer decided to try to implement a software based firewall that blocked rss files. This was such a weird error but the engineer didn’t know what rss or curl was if that tells you something. I changed jobs before fixing it and by the time I cared about such things again pipes was gone.

I don't want to spam the project, but since you mention Pipes like that: I tried to bring it back with https://www.pipes.digital/. Can't do everything the original could and some things it just does differently, but merging RSS feeds and filtering them is exactly the main thing I use it for myself.

Thanks for sharing this, awesome project. The feature set looks pretty comprehensive from the screenshots.

Is there a way to export the created canvas from the editor?

I’m imagining a workflow where people/teams create the RSS processing canvases and then share them using an export.

Also is there a CLI tool?

Hey, thanks :) The project's web application is currently not separated enough into backend/frontend to forge a CLI tool from that backend. There is an export function, but it's meant as a data export for all the pipes (to not hold data hostage), not per canvas, and to my knowledge no one so far has tried to work with the JSON representation the site exports.

However, you can fork pipes in the site UI and then edit them like that. And if a team would share an account to manage a set of Pipes together there is nothing that would prevent that.

Thanks for the details.

The sort of thing I was thinking about was something similar to how post production workflows are setup in film vfx.

You have teams of artists working on 2d and 3d software packages locally. They then save their project, which produces a file that can be rendered on the render farm.

In this rss news equivalent, teams could mash together RSS feeds. Then send their local project export to a backend infrastructure, that would do something with the export, maybe generate a static site, or something more complex .

I mean, RSS fits well to prepare data to go somewhere. Just the offline part you probably do not need. Create your pipe, share the account, or let the other developer fork the pipe. The tool that in the end consumes the feed can just work with the online feed directly from Pipes - those tools expect an url anyway.

God, Yahoo Pipes is a blast from the past. Yahoo did so many things that were new and interesting, but never seemed to be able to bring them altogether into a cohesive product.

Sometimes I think of them as Xerox Parc as they obviously had some smart people sort of tooting around on neat stuff, not worrying about money.

They made so much money, until they didn’t. It’s interesting how these large organizations are able to sort of be patrons of certain activities. Other companies may have spent the surplus on hookers and coke, yahoo let engineers build stuff.

Some parts of it were due to an Israeli startup they bought, called Dapper. Seems to me like they bought it just to take some patents and kill it.

It was interesting, but does it align with Yahoo's interest?

Kind of like Google buying of freebase. They made a few interesting projects on top of it and then killed those...

I remember I discovered a page of just amazing project after amazing they released with most recently abandoned and the rest following shortly thereafter.

I don't think any of it was so groundbreaking it would be useful today but there were a number of wheels that would end up being reinvented between then and now.

Off Topic:

>yahoo pipes

So many "Low Code" or "No Code" project but nothing even comes close to Yahoo Pipes.

I never experienced Yahoo Pipes however, I looked at some videos on YouTube and it appears to be similar to Node-Red. It may not be as intuitive but it looks like it may provide a similar experience.

https://nodered.org/

Possible example: https://dannysu.com/2016/12/29/huginn-to-node-red/

There are also a few RSS discussions in the Node-Red forum: https://discourse.nodered.org/

I use Huginn to consume and email me RSS feeds too.

Pipes was radical. Loved it.

I mentioned it above but you may find Huginn an interesting tool.

> I think my digital life would be a mess without an RSS feed reader.

Then again, staying on top of everything is overrated.

For example, knowing every time someone responded to you on HN is most likely a net negative. They're likely to just be arguing with you. Better to navigate to your comment history on HN when you feel like arguing than getting notified on each reply.

This comment is a good example. You were just enjoying your Thursday and I found a bone to pick with your comment. Why would you want this pushed into your life instead of pulled into your life when you're in the mood to deal with it? ;)

You of course can open your RSS reader only when you're in the mood for it. But I think there's value in the disorganization of distractions. You forgot to check NYTimes or HN replies or whatever in 2 months? It's not like you missed anything important.

I found it nice to just have a list of links in a Notes.app file that I check every once in a while for leisure.

At the risk of proving your point: why would I bother commenting if I didn't want to have a conversation? I'm either shouting into the void to hear my own figurative voice, or I think other people might actually be interested in what I have to say.

I'm really grateful to the GP, because I didn't have a solution for getting notified when I have a reply here, so I mostly wound up missing them.

Same here, RSS is the center of all my internet content consumption. How else could one keep track of things? There isn't any substitute.

I get HN via RSS but didn't know about the replies feed, cool!

I use rss2email to turn everything into effectively a mailing list, so convenient.

Very sad that craigslist broke their RSS feed a few months ago, so I can no longer shop for anything advertised there for sale.

Using rss2email crossed my mind a few times since I already spend most of my day in the terminal anyway, but it always end up being left for tomorrow.

I should take a look at it tomorrow.

I run a paid email forwarding service that allows you to redirect mail sent to a burner address to be published as an RSS feed. Link in my bio if you're interested.

With very rare exceptions[1], I prefer to self-host everything I use and pay a licence fee instead. If that is an option, let me know.

[1] Feedbin being one of them.

I use https://rssby.email.

I feel like I’m plugging huginn all over this thread but they have a phantomjs agent that makes it fairly straightforward to scrape a Craigslist search

Reeder (Mac, iOS) is one of the first apps I install on any new device where I didn’t migrate everything with Apple’s setup assistant. It’s absolutely crucial to my digital life that I have an RSS client, as it’s the first step in my chain of tools for consuming content. I usually won’t bother bookmarking a site that has periodic updates but no RSS feed as I deem such sites not to be worth the effort.

I’ve been getting back into RSS feeds so I could follow news sources and blogs of people I know without an algorithm dictating what I see like all the news apps you get these days. You just gave me some real cool resources to add. Thanks!

I didn’t appreciate RSS enough back when it was a hot new thing, now in these days of the algorithmic internet it’s a blessing and a relief.

I really like Mastodon as a platform for the largely same reason. It’s “neutral” with its chronological feeds and you control what you see, especially if you run an instance.

Saw a post recently that sums it up nicely and could equally apply to RSS: “On Mastodon the content is the product and you’re the algorithm.”

Thanks I'm an RSS nut too but didn't know about hnrss. Super useful to keep track of replies.

Yeah, I found so many cool projects that did not get any atention on Show HN because of hnrss.org. Definetely a feature Hacker News itself should add — they do have RSS for the front page[1], though, with a volume of about 3460 articles per month.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Damn, as someone who has only ever subscribed to RSS feeds on the odd occasion in the past, your comment here has really shone a light on just how powerful this tool can be.

Thanks for sharing this insight!

Is your daily driver OS also Ubuntu? How do you organise / consume your RSS feed(s)?

Seems like you've really streamlined your setup to the point of it having minimal friction - I'd be keen to try emulate this.

I use Ubuntu as my only operating system, yes, on both the desktop and on servers.

There really is nothing special about my workflow, though, I just keep Feedbin open in the browser and check it throughout the day, acting when necessary[1]. I am currently subscribed to 182 feeds, so I spend a considerable amount of time reading and acting on what I read.

The most "unusual" piece of the workflow is probably YouTube, since I watch without access their website. When a new video is posted, Feedbin notifies me and I copy the URL of the video from inside the application. I then paste that on a terminal to feed mpv or youtube-dl depending on when I want to watch it, and move on. Since I use a tilling window manager and the browser I use for day to day use is on a workspace where an empty terminal window is always open next to it, everything happens faster than it probably reads from my larger than it should description.

[1] Acting means either reading an article, notifying customers, or testing and updating servers based on releases and vulnerabilities in this context.

> Since I use a tilling window manager and the browser I use for day to day use is on a workspace where an empty terminal window is always open next to it, everything happens faster than it probably reads from my larger than it should description.

This was the key insight I was hoping for - thanks!

Also, TIL that I can watch YT with MPV and terminal-fed URLs. That's a game-changer for me. Cheers.

> This was the key insight I was hoping for - thanks!

You are welcome! I separate workspaces by their purposes so to speak, so the one with qutebrowser[1] is divided in four squares, with qutebrowser, aerc[2], profanity[3], and an empty terminal window.

When I need to focus on one, I just switch it to full screen with a keyboard shortcut.

> Also, TIL that I can watch YT with MPV and terminal-fed URLs.

  mpv --ontop --no-border --on-all-workspaces --autofit=1280x720 --geometry=98%:98% "${YOUTUBE_URL}" &> /dev/null &

Just to complete my previous comment, the command above gives you an YouTube video played by mpv in picture by picture mode, which should always persist on top when switching workspaces in i3wm.

[1] The browser I use daily for personal things. Work stays in another browser in another workspace.

[2] Command-line email client.

[3] Command-line XMPP client.

You sir, are a legend, thanks for all the useful tips.

> Also, TIL that I can watch YT with MPV and terminal-fed URLs. That's a game-changer for me. Cheers.

You can even pass youtube-dl parameters using mpv. The one I use the most is --ytdl-format which corresponds to -f on the youtube-dl side.

Cheers thanks!

Another very happy Feedbin user here. I've subscribed for several years.

I recently moved all my YouTube subscriptions to Feedbin. World of difference. I see what I ask for, and nothing more.

Same with Twitter. I quit the platform more than a year ago, but there are just a few accounts that I actually want to keep track of. Feedbin does it seamlessly.

For those who require very custom, niche feeds, you might want to try rss-proxy [0] which automatically maps HTML markup to RSS feeds.

[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/

Big fan of RSS. Feel free to try out my RSS reader tool: http://freerss.robdelacruz.com/

Drag/drop rearrange rss feeds in an album-like layout. Open source too.

> While Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you when someone replies to you, hnrss.org provides an RSS feed for that

That's awesome, just recently started using RSS seriously (less than 6 months) I'll definitely have a look. Also for replies, I think hnreplies[0] isworth mentioning. Discovered it by interacting with the author here on HN.

0: https://www.hnreplies.com/

>As a system administrator, I can use RSS to keep up to date

Along the same sentiment, I've taken things further and update my RSS feeds on demand. I use a suite of tools that pull entries[1] using Newsboat[2] and send them over SMTP (with a `sendmail` tool), optionally saving the emails[3] that couldn't be sent to disk.

Combined with a local server[4] relying on NewsAPI[5] that can pull news from sites that don't provide with an RSS feed (AP, RT…), it's a great decentralised and modular setup!

[1] https://github.com/lenormf/newsboat-sendmail [2] https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat [3] https://github.com/lenormf/sendmail-tryqueue [4] https://github.com/lenormf/news2rss [5] https://newsapi.org/

Great collection of rss feeds.

I build my own rss feed for HN, because i want only see posts which reach >500 Points in a week [1].

So i did for a few other websites: Reddit r/programming (at least 500 points / week)[2] Producthunt (at least 300 / week)[3]

What I'm searching, is a rss feed where i get notified when a book author release a new Book. Unfortunately i didn't found one.

[1] https://us-central1-social-channel-notifier.cloudfunctions.n...

[2] https://us-central1-social-channel-notifier.cloudfunctions.n...

[3] https://us-central1-social-channel-notifier.cloudfunctions.n...

I am also interested in something similar for other subreddits. Is this open source ?

Woah .. thanks for [3]. Who made this ? Why don't they Show HN ? It has been submitted only 3 times ( including 5 minutes ago by me ) and never had more than 8 points ... this is pretty cool stuff, some fruitful exchanges assuredly go to waste for lack of someone checking their comments from two days ago ...

Aww man, I just wrote my own replies fetcher script in php the other day before I heard about hnrss

Care to ( can you ) share what that looks like ?

Certainly. Here's the whole thing: https://pastebin.com/ZZAscpyk

I host it on a generic cPanel webhost.

It's not very robust, there's no error checking, and it only grabs the first page of replies, but it's sufficient to prompt me to look at all the comments if needed.

If I ever become a celebrity then I will revisit this script :-D

> Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you when someone replies to you

This can't be an oversight, the feature is too obvious, too easy to implement. This has to be a deliberate choice.

Does anyone know why HN made this choice?

The day I discovered feedbin can follow twitter lists and you can use it to subscribe to mailing lists, it got me in.